How Roadmunk grew Roadmunk to $8M revenue and 2K customers in 2018.

hello everyone my guest today is latif nanji he's the co-founder and ceo of a company called road monk a product road mapping platform that enables clients like coca-cola citibank mastercard and adobe to visualize and collaborate on strategic plans all right latif are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so this is like i mean is this like you know trello or base camp for the enterprise uh in a sense uh yes but really what we actually do is we think of ourselves as the mezzanine layer above those tools in a lot of cases tactical teams need to still stay in the trellos and jiras and asanas of the worlds and we're not there to compete with them we look at ourselves as a way to make it easy to visualize and manage and create plans that executive stakeholders or stakeholders that are not used to working in those day-to-day tools really need some level of visibility into interesting okay very good and give me a sense of you know we obviously know the monthly kind of averages in terms of price points for those tools on your tool what's the average company paying per year would you say yeah so we have sort of three different segments uh but on average across you know sort of the mainstream of customers you're looking around four thousand dollars per year okay good okay so so not not super enterprise but you know bigger than smb i would say yeah so we do have a whole segment of customers that are a mid-market and enterprise that do pay in the more traditional numbers which would be somewhere between 25 to 100k just depending on if they use uh take advantage of some of our security features so we do offer uh virtual private clouds for the enterprise as well as just larger seat volumes which come in at platform pricing that's interesting so are those your two main leverage points in terms of your pricing axes to drive expansion revenue uh yes as we also have a per seat model as well which is more traditional and we use that and on top of the enterprise they have other requests that we've enabled us to grow our business and expansion beyond the traditional per seat pricing interesting so seats security features and some other product features exactly interesting okay put all this on the timeline when do you launch company 2013 is when we started and founded the company in january okay and then we launched into market at the end of 2014. so we've been in market for about four years now that's great and what have you scaled to in terms of total customers yeah so we've got uh without like getting directly but we're within two within two thousand to three thousand customers right okay in that range fairly healthy yeah so i mean look uh you know taking the 2000 we'll go on the minimum since you gave a range if you do 2 000 times that 4 000 price point i mean what does that put you out if i do the division 600 grand a month something like that is that right we're about there yeah yeah that's great that's great a little above or a little below above above when um what has the growth rate been like over the past 12 months where we had a year ago uh yeah so we've been 2016 was the triple and then we've been constantly doubling each year since then that's pretty okay so if you're north of 600 today in terms of monthly revenue you know you're about what three 300 grand about a year ago uh yes i think a little bit less than that but around there okay interesting and what's driven most the growth over the past 12 months is it expansion across the you know the old cohort or is it new customers yeah it's about 60 40 split between new and expansion we're seeing really healthy expansion simply because of the viral the viral nature of the software i think a lot of tools that are product led growth just like we are have found ways within the tool to do the land and expand models so we start with a few seats make a few champions really successful and then from there we see other product managers who are our target primary audience for this tool then go and talk since they have a lot of influence within the organization whether it's on the executive branch or towards other um you know cross-functional teams that work and need visibility into what's going on in the plan so how effective has that been what is your expansion on a cohort from 12 months ago typically yeah so while on a cohort basis it's different varying month by month but if we look at sort of averages it's around at least 40 percent of you know our monthly uh net revenue our net new mrr is going to be from expansion okay let me repeat that back to make sure i get 40 of your net of revenue you add in a given month is going to be from expansion revenue yeah so let's say in a month you add 50 kmrr 20 of that would be from got it but but i'm curious on a cohort basis because this gets into churn like what's your revenue churn per year yeah so we don't necessarily disclose those numbers uh for now just because it's a bit of a competitive space we don't want to get to that but we're i would say we're around we're slightly below average i think we're doing pretty healthy um so i would say it's somewhere between on a gross basis between two and three okay that's not and that's monthly or annually yeah it's on an annual basis it's two percent oh sorry monthly basis around two two and a half percent got it two for so called 24 revenue churn per year it sounds like you have healthy expansion though are you above 100 in terms of net revenue retention absolutely we have net negative churn that's great yeah it's always it's always fascinating to me too like people use those those are basically this you consider those the same thing right net negative revenue churn and net revenue expansion being above 100 yes absolutely yeah it's it's just interesting some people choose to like i guess think about it positively so they talk about retention others think about it negatively so they think about churn it's just a mindset thing it is so thank you for talking to investors they love talking about retention they're less worried about this net negative thing they want to understand retention on a cohort basis understanding which codes are mature if they've been you know gone through a full annual cycle if you know you're billing in that manner so there's all those dynamics net negative churn is probably something founders sometimes tend towards but it just depends on you know who's the audience and what kind of person is looking at that just funny to me it's because it's basically you know revenue or sorry churn plus like retention right like they equal 100 no matter which way you cut the dice it's just which side you want to focus on okay good so healthy healthy expansion there and then walk me through i mean you launch in 2013 it sounds like you really kick things into year 2014 first hundred customers where'd they come from you know what nathan we had no idea where they were gonna come from we just put up a a website we had a product and we connected our stripe uh you know the stripe api within the first 90 days we had 50 customers i remember on december 31 2014 at like we wanted to get from 49 to 50 and we called a couple people that were in trial we'll sell them we'll give them a heavy discount just so that optically we could when we were starting to raise capital we just showed them that we got 50 customers in 90 days so it really just came simply by seo and marketing that was the channel we had we had written some content we hadn't obviously done a full throttle because it had been only just uh 90 days but we had i would say on average at the time probably about 10 to 15 signups a day so very modest compared to where we are today and then from there we were able to do some pretty great conversion because tools on the market were still um very early on in this particular space interesting so okay so first 50 customers came mainly from seo and content um what is the team today and how many folks are are you know focused on seo content sales marketing yeah so we have 66 people today at roadmonk and our sales and cs team is about i'd say 14 but mostly cs predominantly we have only two sales people and then in the marketing side we have about 10 people interesting curious question here do your cs people carry any kind of quota they do have targets in which they have to hit and they're not comp they're they're not competent in the traditional sense like you need to do you know 100 000 in expansion over the quarter or something of that nature we actually do it based on the quick ratio so we look at both um expansion contraction churn and new if they're closing any deals usually they're able to do any transactional deals so deals that are likely smaller than five thousand dollars um and then from there our sales team would take over if they're larger deals and have to go a traditional through a traditional procurement process so so how i'm cure i want to dive into that how do you set because i'm seeing the cs role really the companies that have healthy expansion have really smart cs teams and i'm trying to understand how ceos like yourself are motivating these cs folks because these aren't people you're just hiring off the street and these are very talented people right so when you say you motivate them that like there is a target but it's not it's not a quota carrying role like what what does that target actually sound like yeah so for example um so they have a portfolio of customers so we have to start there they they own a segment...